Jordan Ranft

Poem to be read while standing over a dead CEO

Great. Now everyone wants to fuck you.
It’s the end of the day and the marble steps are slanted gold.
Little holes, as if chewed, peppered through a golf shirt. 

There’s going to be so much discourse. Vapor spooling
from the blood, marquee lights hanging from the portico.
The world shakes its head like a dog then lives

another ten billion years. Romans paid their soldiers
in salt and fucked each other in broad pavilions, sucked wine
from the skin of each other’s stomachs, laurels hanging 

from their cocks. They caught you on a camera perched
on a stoplight. In the park, horses chew through
their leather bits and trample down the sumac, the bottlebrush. 

Have you heard this one before? There’s a country for you
somewhere. There’s a country slinking just outside
the yellow cone of a streetlight and it has a gun.

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Jordan Ranft is a Best of the Net and Pushcart-nominated poet. He placed third at the 2015 National Poetry Slam representing Team Berkeley. His chapbook, Said the Worms, was published by Wrong Publishing in 2023. His work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry Online, Boulevard, Frontier Poetry, Passages North and others. He lives in Northern California where he works as a therapist.